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The Jaina Philosophy opened and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his favourite books, passages from which were identified with those spoken by the girl in her fever. Erasmus mentions and Italian who spoke German, though he had forgotten that language for twenty years; there is also a case recorded of a butcher's boy who, when in sang, recited passages from the Phedre which he had heard only once. All these facts are so well-known that they need only here be cited; they, with many others, prove that in the very depths of the soul there exists many a memory which seemed to have vanished for ever.
An idea that has passed away from consciousness is not destroyed, but only transformed. Instead of being a present idea, it becomes a residuum, representing a certain tendency of the mind exactly proportioned to the energy of the original idea. The existence of ideas in an unconscious state might, therefore, be regarded as a state of perfect equilibrium. In other words, whenever any piece of information or knowledge comes to us like a flash, it is because that information or that knowledge was acquired by us sometime in the past, it having gone into a latent state in the mean-time.
If such wonderful revival of a former consciousness or memory can be accomplished in an unconscious or unintentional way, there must be a science which can teach how to accomplish the same result consciously and intentionally. Electricity existed even before the science of electricity was formulated; only in those primitive days people did not know its laws. It is claimed by the Jainas of India that they possess a perfect system of philosophy, which teaches how to cultivate and perform wonderful feats of memory. We may only. hope that our psychologists would get hold of a learned Jaina and find out from him the methods and secret of this wonderful science.
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